The Sympathetic Imagination

Digital Supplement to the Exhibition Catalogue

Six monitors and one player
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the Hadley Martin Fisher Collection

Perfect Devotion Six,2006

Architectural framing

In Acton, California, three tigers—Mona, Simba, and the star of the work,
a blind tiger named Zoe—live at a rescue for big cats. I filmed the cats in
35mm film over the course of one day, documenting their reactions to a series
of interventions in the large pen in which they live. First I laid down sod,
giving the animals a green carpet on which to play. This piece, shot at dawn,
shows the tigers taking their first steps onto soft green grass. Trepidatious
but soon playful, the animals are seen from a stationary camera suspended
overhead from a crane. The separated and vertically hung monitors play with
the standard presentation of video walls. The shadow of the fenced enclosure
around the tigers further testifies to the intervention of architecture in the
world of animals, a world in nature that is without walls and where boundaries
are invisible.